Denkwerk

Networking High School Students, Teachers and Scholars in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

The program Denkwerk is our support program for partnerships between academics, teachers, and students who want to work together on projects in a specific region. Depending on the nature of the project, other institutions such as museums, libraries, courts, churches, and businesses can participate in the regional network.

The purpose of the program is to give students and teachers a look behind the scene at current research in the humanities and social sciences and allow them to appreciate the value of the many different perspectives with which the different disciplines in these fields address fundamental social issues. By actively participating in smaller research projects, students gain insight into the questions and methods of the humanities and social sciences to make a well-informed choice later when deciding what to study at university.

Denkwerk in Action: Examples from Practical Experience

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In the “School of Sight,” students and their teachers from schools in Berlin, together with art historians, analyse original building structures and artwork in Berlin - here the Jordanian Mshatta Facade in the Pergamon Museum is being shown to the school group. And that is just one of the activities in “Denkwerk Art History: Education through Art”, By handling subjects from art history, students are able to acquire picture and media expertise, as well as expertise in humanities methods.

In the Upper Bavarian towns of Vaterstetten and Bad Aibling, students and their teachers, university students, and historians are researching the subject of “External Perception and Self Perception at the End of the Second World War” in their own surroundings - with remarkable results …

“What are the political effects of various electoral systems?” This is the question, which students at three high schools from the Bavarian region of Rottal-Inn, together with their teachers and political scientists from universities in Passau and Chemnitz, posed themselves in the project “The Political Effects of Electoral Systems.” In this project they also compare the behavior of representatives in selected European countries, such as Great Britain, Germany, Sweden, Austria, and France.

How do I write my own name in cuneiform script? Students get the answer to this question and a lot more in the Denkwerk project “Ancient Orient and Europe. From the Past to the Present,” in which seven secondary schools, two archeology institutions at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Museum of the Ancient Near East are collaborating.

In the project “Fränki,” students in Lower Franconia, together with their teachers and academics from the Lower Franconia Dialect Institute at the University of Würzburg, investigate their own dialect. In doing so, they state risky hypotheses such as “Women speak more dialect than men,” conduct accompanying field research, and present the results at the mini congress at the university.